Sailing to Byzantium

by Robert Silverberg

• Release: February 1985
• Format: Short Story
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Audience: Adults
• Content: Time Phenomena
• Original Language: English

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

• Unspecified Future Year: The time is described as fifty centuries after something without specifying exactly what.

Timeline Models

• Mixed-Era Geography: Not surprisingly, the story has the feel of mixed-era geography, even though it isn’t. In his introduction to the story in Multiples, 1983–87, Silverberg notes that he wanted to avoid being nothing more than an updating to Murray Leinster’s classic novella “Sidewise in Time.”

Themes

• Robots or Androids: not time-traveling
• Simulation
• Time Montages: minor drug-induced time montage that was likely a flood of memory
• Time Travel Agencies, Safaris, and Tourists: Even though there is no actual time travel, the story has the feel of presenting a leisure class of time travel tourists.

Fictional Tags

• Minotaurs, Centaurs, and Other Mash-Ups: Hippogriffs and griffins, among others.
• Unicorns

Groupings

• Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (periodical): February 1985
• The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (anthology)
• Sirius (periodical): #138, November 1987
• Time Travelers’: From Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (anthology)

INDEXER NOTES (SPOILERS!)

• Debut—The <a href='http%3A%2F%2Fwww.isfdb.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Ftitle.cgi%3F40973'>ISFDB</a> lists a <samp>June 1985</samp> release date for the Underwood-Miller chapbook, so we have listed the earlier <samp>February</samp> issue of <em>Asimov’s</em> as the debut, but Silverberg’s intro to the story in <em>Multiples 1983–87</em> says that the limited edition of the chapbook was first.